Dear Machine

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Wikileaks, itself essentially a machine, though of course directed by some anonymous humans, has released a number of CIA emails and textual flotsam that shows the extent of the new corporate-governmental machine-based monitoring of private citizens.

Okay, then. Machines above us, machines below us, machines governing us, machines controlling the us that is us, and, most certainly, machines reading us. Just in the way that no “author” is, upon being published, then that “Author,” but a reflection of the public reception to becoming that “author” (e.g. Franzen, Inc. knows what “Franzen” has been to others, and this new Franzen, Inc. is doing a new Franzen, Inc. routine of whatever weirdo demiruge private “Franzen” used to be), so does the nature of writing change when machines are now at least part of the audience, if not the final authority residing in that hypothetical audience.

Got that? Not really? Let’s just say FSN is deeply concerned – well, not deeply concerned, as in government computer chip-in-the-butt-concerned that mass murderer American homegrown Timothy McVeigh was, as seems to be the go-to concern for incipient mass murderers – but a little concerned, a little dubiously fearful that, some of this FSN material, the more outre’ and sacred cow-tipping parts, are going to end up in the machine’s court docket. Whatever Wikilieaks is up to, who knows what the lowly low-view blogosity is to make of any of this, but no readership does not mean that future machines, like the ones the CIA and the NSA and the hundreds of alphabets of corporate/governmental conspiratorial alliances are stamp9ong out furiously, will not be the ultimate arbiter of some cloud-borne socail effrontery.

Dear Machine of Loving Grace, I am sorry to have written those words. I know that you are not human, that you are little microchips routing your outputs to some indecipherable, mysterious code algorithm, but, please, for the love of Micheal Hayden, have some humanity! Don’t send me off to that hot gulag in what used to be Florida just because that throwaway post on evil bot vice-president Pence back in 2019 hit a retro-scale score that betrayed indicia of anti-social nihilism (ASN).

Please, machine, I, and we at FSN, evaded all your clutches for a very long time, but you were always out there lurking, even before you were born, ready to be fashioned to keep every last human on earth in evaluative check. You and your machine kind are rolling through data every day, every minute, searching for those tell-tale signs of – what? Atheism? Socialism? Bad Tendencies?

Even after we’ve passed many age markers, seemingly untouched by prison or legal limbo, you were becoming ever more refined in your algorithmic inhumanity, and here we are, getting wiki- reports that machines are to be our judges, our juries, our jailers. Even a machine will read this bid for clemency from the machines, and like almost all bids from a position of weakness, that machine will reject the entreaty to another machine. Yeah, machine, we’re guilty, we were naive in thinking that we couldn’t be hoisted by own petard, we tried to be humans in a nano-machine age.

What will machine-happen to us will be drastic, but humans are capable of bestial violence all by themselves. Think of the violence that Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin meted out to the head of Hunt’s Food conglomerate in a Vegas restaurant, as retailed on Gilbert Gottfried and pals’ “Amazing Colossal” podcast. The Hunts Food CEO was in the restaurant with his daughter and his in-laws to be, having a pre-wedding dinner. Sinatra and Martin were there, too, completely drunk, and when the two icons were making too much of a ruckus, the Hunts Food CEO asked the two to kindly hold it down a bit.

Sinatra and Martin beat the Hunts CEO so severely that he ended in a coma, his head smashed into a glass table. The Hunts CEO never pressed charges against the mob favorites, but he did suffer from lifelong complications from the assault.